Friday, December 26, 2014

(VHP top official Ashok Chowgule has reacted to a recent column by Swapan Dasgupta, effectively a representative of the dominant wing in the BJP, viz. the economic rightists. Many of them regularly pooh-pooh the other wing of the BJP, viz. the cultural nationalists. It might be useful, for those interested, if I give my viewpoint to the
same questions as put to Swapan Dasgupta, posed after hisNDTV column of 22
December 2014: "Some in RSS Have Profound Distaste for PM". Here goes: )

1.How
many in the BJP have a profound distaste for the RSS?

It is
not for me to give numbers here, but after the Rama Janmabhumi agitation, which
the BJP tried to shake off after reaping the dividends in the 1991 elections, my
impression was of a constant growth in the number of BJP men who wanted to
distance themselves and the party from the RSS and from any Hindu ideology. The
hegemonic ideology of secularism made ever deeper inroads among the members of a
party started for the sake of Hindu interests. It reached a symbolic culmination
when LK Advani, the face of the Ayodhya movement, called the demolition on 6
Dec. 1992 "the blackest day" of his life. The present government and its
dependencies are full of time-servers and opportunists who don't want to be
bothered with ideology and just want to make hay while Modi's sun shines. Those
who cared for Hinduism were not always the most sophisticated either. I remember
a conversation with BL Sharma Prem, BJP MP from Delhi, where he talked loosely
about "teaching Muslims a lessen" and all that. Many Hindu activists confuse
toughness and ideological commitment with a willingness to use unprovoked
violence. They are the best allies of the secularist propaganda equating Hindu
activism with violence against the minorities.

2.Given
that the BJP seeks and gets the support of the total Sangh parivar at the time
of the elections, should not their concerns be addressed by the BJP?

The
argument used by the economy-wallahs is precisely that the BJP should do its
voters' bidding, and that it won the elections on a development platform. No, it
won the election because numerous Hindu voters finally believed there was a
pro-Hindu among the serious candidates, namely Narendra Modi, and that is why
exceptionally they bothered to go cast their votes. They never would have done
that just for the BJP. Baba Ramdev is but the most famous of the numerous people
who assured me that they voted for Modi, not for the BJP.

3.You
say that Narendraji made the VHP irrelevant in Gujarat. Apart from being
factually wrong, and assuming that the effort was made, was it the right thing
to do in terms of the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

It is
truly bad for a BJP man to treat the VHP as an enemy, on a par with the Nehru
dynasty or the Naxalites. Indeed it is they who should and do treat the VHP as
an enemy whom they mean to destroy. That the VHP was virtually destroyed in
Gujarat, I heard in tempore non suspecto from a Gujarat BJP man, so I guess it
may well be true. The infighting inside the Sangh Parivar escapes most
secularist "studies" as these are meant to uphold the image of a "fascist"
monolith, but we know that it is there.

4.Suppose
the attempt was indeed made, and had it been successful, would not an important
part of the Sangh parivar been organisationally destroyed? And would this have
benefited the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

Destroying
a part of the Sangh Parivar is bad for the Sangh Parivar, but I would con,done
it if it was somehow beneficial to the Hindu cause. But nothing indicates such
an outcome, nor such a concern. If the present BJP acts against the most
ideologically committed member of the Sangh Parivar, viz. the VHP, it is
invariably an attempt to shake off ideology.

5.You
have talked about the Hindu Mahasabha. Is this a member of the Sangh parivar?

Originally,
the difference was that it was a political party, while the RSS was not. It is
on this ground that Nathuram Godse crossed over from the RSS to the HMS. After
the founding of the Jan Sangh in 1952, then the BJP in 1980, this distinction
has become irrelevant. The only difference in discourse is that the Hindu
Mahasabha openly supports Nathuram Godse and the Mahatma murder, while the Sangh
Parivar condemns them, in vain. The secularists are correct in pointing out
that Godse has had his ideological education in the RSS, but the RSS is correct
in stating that its strategy does not include targeted murders. In that sense,
Godse acted on his own and made a very individual applicatio of the Hindu
nationalism he had learnt.

6.You
say: “There is also a media environment that is conducive to the fringe. It
simply requires some 50 individuals, a controversial cause and a few TV cameras
to give otherwise irrelevant people notoriety, publicity and even secure
political impact.” Is this not a bad reflection of the profession that you are
associated with – namely journalism?

Is
this a reference to my talk at the India Ideas Conclave, much filmed and talked
about, especially to highlight the anti-Islamic element in circles associated
with the Modi government? It is at any rate true that I am "irrelevant". None of my books or opinions personally communicated
to Hindutva bigwigs during interviews or on group occasions has made any impact,
and secularists have taken even less notice. If Swapan knows of a journalistic
way to transmute this irrelevance into "political impact", he is welcome me tell me about it.

7.During
NDA 1, you had said that there are many in the BJP that are seeking a
certificate of secularism from the very people whom they have labelled as
pseudo-secular. I wonder if this malice has not already become prominent in NDA
2.

BJP
people seeking secularist certificates is still a problem now that they have an
absolute majority. They have never elaborated an analysis of their own, so they
are still dependent on the worldview furnished by the secularists.

8.You
say: “There is a feeling in government circles that the present controversies
that led to the disruption of Parliament were wilfully triggered by VHP's Dr
Pravin Togadia, an individual who has an acrimonious relationship with Modi.” I
really hope you are not serious.

I have
no idea of personal relationships. I do notice, however, that the people who
triggered the ideological controversies which Modi put down, have not done their
homework. Rather than achieving pro-Hindu reforms, they merely ruffle feathers
and create commotion by talking about them. Where is the strategy for pro-Hindu
reform?

Ghar
Wapasi is the only solution for the Dying Race. It should not be stopped or
postponed for any other political goal. Any other strategy to stop the
aggressive onward march of the minorities is doomed to failure, e.g. "teaching
Muslims a lesson" or demographic mobilization. It follows, however, that there
is no ground for an anti-conversion bill, which doesn't work anyway (cfr.
China), antagonizes world opinion, and belongs to the mindless repressive
policies (cfr. book-banning) with which Hindu activism is already too
associated.

(The World Hindu Congress of 21-23 November
2014 in Delhi, an achievement by Swami Vigyananda, compares favourably with other
similar initiatives, being more focused and free of compromise with secularism.
It offered a taste of what an unfettered Hindu society in normal non-Nehruvian
circumstances could be. One of the seven conferences was the Organizational
Conference, which concluded with a panel debate. As another speaker had
cancelled, I was asked to improvise an intervention. On the basis of
impressions gathered at the congress and in informal talks in the lobby, I
presented the following observations.)

One has to
be in sympathy with the small minority of Hindus who like to pin-prick the
hollow optimism typical of the RSS. This organization likes to style itself as the
vanguard of Hindu revival, but has not stopped Nehruism and the decline of
Hinduism. On the contrary, it plays by the rules laid down by its enemies. The
commitment to Hinduism is subordinate to the eagerness for mere trinkets, such
as the shine of secularist approval, a prize dangled before pliant
Hindutvavadis but never really given.

Many Hindus
like to boast how good Hindus are at making money, how they are the richest
immigrant community in the US, but it always proves very difficult to amass
funds for Hindu causes. And when they are available, they are squandered on
luxuries rather than on substance. It is therefore quite an achievement to get
this WHC on the rails, an event that has paid its own way thanks to the
registration fees paid by some 1800 participants. The present successful
achievement is but one of several signs of hope.

Tamas

At Hindu
gatherings I attended during the past few decades, the atmosphere was
distinctly “tamasic”. This is a concept from Hindu cosmology, where it is one
of the three elements in a tripolar model of the universe. The three are (1)
sattva, the light and transparent pole, (2) rajas, the dynamic and passionate
pole, and (3) tamas, the dark and heavy pole. Tamas means inertia, passivity,
slothfulness, confusion and resistance to innovation. It is not so good at
action, but very resourceful at inventing excuses for inaction.

That was
till recently the dominant mood at Hindu gatherings. There was endless wailing
about what the enemies did to Hindus, but no plans were devised, let alone
implemented, to remedy these injustices. There were also conspiracy theories,
the wilder the better, to explain why the enemies were both evil and powerful,
so much so that the thought of countering them did not even arise.
Incidentally, a mirror-image of these conspiracy theories is the strawman that
the secularists make of the Hindu movement: to their captive audiences, such as
the consumers of the mainstream media or the Western donors of the Christian
mission: they feed the lie that Hindu activism is evil, powerful and
diabolically clever. The use of this untruth is that it can present any
anti-Hindu action as brave and any anti-Hindu oppression as necessary.

But the
difference is that they understand the difference between lies for public
consumption and their private knowledge that Hindu activism is but a paper
tiger. Hindu activists, by contrast, believe in their own conspiracy
concoctions.

Thus, even
at the otherwise stimulating media section of this congress, the
forward-looking atmosphere was tainted only by a cursory remark premised on the
canard that the foreign media are acting out a highly motivated anti-India
strategy explaining their glaring bias and hostility. In reality, the foreign
media have no stake in India and don’t care one way or another. Their partisan
reporting results from the partisan information they are fed by their secular
sources in Delhi, who controlthe narrow
bottleneck of information about India. This news monopoly has existed for
decades and for all this time, it was tolerated and passively perpetuated by
the Hindu forces.

Witness the
tamasic implication of conspiracy theories: they justify and stimulate
passivity. If the enemy is wily and all-powerful, it is no use trying to
counter him, and effectively, Hindus have not bothered to combat the secularist
dominance in the mainstream media. Similarly, the very false but very common
belief that the Partition of India resulted from a British conspiracy. and not
from the application of Islam’s political doctrine to the then Indian situation,
relieves Hindus of the difficult task of analyzing Islam as a factor of
anti-India and anti-Hindu policies. This way they, along with the secularists,
can perpetuate the delusion that Islam is OK, that Hindus and Muslims have
always been brothers only separated by a colonial ‘divide and rule” policy, and
that India’s current problems with Pakistan are due to external factors, such
as the influence of the evil Americans, who count as the secret puppeteers
behind Islamic terrorism.

Against all
these mysterious forces with their hostile agendas, no serious resistance is
possible, and hence the Hindu activists have never organized one. Or have they?

The new media

At this
congress, a different sound was heard. In the media conference, so-called
“internet Hindus” have been reporting how their use of the social media has
bypassed and outwitted the MSM dominated by anti-Hindu voices. Facts are
reported through alternative channels and break through the curtain of silence
about inconvenient information. Many a time, the MSM are forced to react to
knowledge that has turned out to be common among the public, eventhough they
had at first tried to keep the lid on it.

Opinion is
being created through twitter messages. They are tailor-made for a generation
with a short attention span, and hence far more effective than newspaper articles.
They also generate quick and exciting exchanges of opinion. These twitter
debates are very successful at giving the public a gist of the opinion spectrum
that exists relative to a specific issue. They might not be as thorough as an
in-depth article, but they certainly outdo the one-sided articles that make it
through the censorship sieve of the MSM.

The new
media have played a decisive role in winning over the new generation to the
Narendra Modi campaign. That Modi won is admittedly a victory, but we should
not lose sight of the old-style struggle that made it possible. For twelve
years, Modi has had to struggle against an enormously mean secularist campaign
of defamation, inducing even an anti-Modi intrigue within the BJP. Only a year
ago, the BJP leadership tried to thwart Modi from becoming the
Prime-Ministerial candidate. It is when this old-style struggle had been won,
that the struggle for national electoral victory started and the adroit use of
the new media made a difference. So, while the BJP’s media team has an
achievement to be proud of, we should keep in mind the over-all context, where
the secularists have not disarmed and their usual viciousness will certainly
come to plague us again. Our newly acquired skills will be needed.

Corruption

A pervasive
form of tamas in society is corruption. It acts like a parasite, eating away at
the vitality of a society, and at its capacity to act. In the main, the success
of the present Hindu government will be measured by its capacity to curb
corruption. It must not only effect a conjunctural dip, but a structural
remedy. In miniature form, this very congress can serve as an acid test.

At Hindu
conferences I attended in the 1990s, quite a few worthless papers were the
result of the following corrupt practice. The organizers, starved for money,
accepted contributions from sponsors in exchange for the honour of presenting a
paper. In the present case, the organizers were approached several times for
this kind of deal, but they refused. Papers had to stand by virtue of their own
merits, not by virtue of the funds attached to them.

This
awakening to the need of more integrity and more purposeful action is part of a
larger pattern set by politicians like erstwhile Kashmir Governor Jagmohan,
former Minister of Disinvestment Arun Shourie and former Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi: to cut through the vested interests and not to let them sap the
energies of society. All three have been have been criticized by the
secularists as paragons of Hindutva. Indeed, we have it on the authority of the
secularists that those whom we know as men of integrity and as spectacularly
good administrators, are “rabid communalists”, while the opportunists and
time-servers whom they call “moderates”, are practitioners and upholders of
corruption.

Long live dynamism!

Following
this pattern, we see that the effective leadership of the World Hindu Council
(VHP) is now exercised by man who is both impeccable and a reputed Hindu
radical. Swami Vigyananda is a veteran of the Babri Masjid demolition on 6
December 1992, as well as a dynamic organizer with a modern outlook and a
remarkable skill in means, an ease in doing things. So, he had the foresight to
visualize the present congress, which he announced five years ago, and which
happens to coincide with the first Hindu government in Delhi since 1192. (Well,
I’ll grant you Hemachandra in 1556, but his rule lasted only a few weeks, until
the proverbially enlightened Moghul emperor Akbar had him beheaded.)

The window
of opportunity opened by Modi’s victory will not last forever. We must use it
to effect the needed changes in the Indian polity.

This very
congress, very well-organized as you all have noticed, and with a preponderance
of high-quality papers, proves that Hindus manage to outgrow their tamasic
pattern. Correspondingly, the mood is upbeat and creative. There are successes
to report and more to come. Down with the despondency of the past decades! Long
live the self-made Hindu spirit of achievement!

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

To the organizers of the India Ideas Conclave, Goa, 19-21 December 2014 (Mortsel, 23 Dec.):

Dear friends,

It seems the reaction of two foreign Muslims in my audience last Saturday to my critical scholarly remarks on Islamic doctrine and on the person of Mohammed has provoked quite a debate. It involved serious principles of free speech and the curbs on it by Indian laws instituted by the British rulers who, to prevent riots, wanted to protect Islam from scrutiny by a Hindu writer. Which reminds me that even after the publication of SR Goel's book Freedom of Expression, to which I contributed, the organized Hindu movement has failed to take a clear stand against these laws. If not abolished, they should at any rate be rewritten so that they can not be used as de facto blasphemy laws, which is how they are used against me. At the time of the Wendy Doniger affair, where Hindus have dishonourably used these same anti-freedom laws to pressurize her publisher to pulp her book, I have signed a petition for abolishing these laws (for the occasion even laying aside my differences with Romila Thapar). In fact, these laws affecting everyone who presents truly original ideas to the world would have been a truly worthy topic for an India Ideas Conference.

An interesting detail: someone sitting behind the Jordanian protester heard him fumble that I had called Mohammed "a rapist" and "a pedophile". Such things were on his mind when he filed a complaint against me. The truth is that I have called the Prophet neither. The topic of pedophilia and Mohammed's oft-discussed marriage to 6-year-old Aisha didn't come up at all. If it had, I still would have refrained from calling it pedophilia, as in this case I want to make allowances for cultural differences, even if I still don't think that ancient Arab society fully condoned (as opposed to tolerated) marriage to pre-pubescent girls. I didn't call Mohammed in person a "rapist", although his forcing a Jewish woman into concubinage with him hours after killing her husband and male relatives would informally qualify as rape. Mohammed was too well endowed with wives and concubines to need rape, but on repeated occasions he condoned the rape of his hostages by his men, on one occasion stipulating that they should do it with coitus interruptus (even a hostage-taking mafia don has a sense of honour and doesn't want the goods he returns in exchange of ransom money to be damaged), on another that they needn't bother as God makes pregnant or not whomever he wants. That he condoned rape, I did indeed mention, viz. as juridically fully valid explanation for the Caliphate warriors' practice of rape.

It is a prime illustration of the Caliphate's self-justification by Mohammed's precedent, hence of my position that the Caliphate is but an application and vivid illustration of true Islam. No Islamic Judge or jurisconsult can condemn an act that is but an re-application of the Prophet's precedent, which itself is that basis of Islamic law. Else they would have to imply or say that "Mohammed was a bad Muslim" (or after David Cameron's exegetic wisdom: he was "a monster, not a Muslim"). Nor will any Islamic judge or jurisconsult deny the episodes of Mohammed condoning rape, which are the topic of well-known Ahadith (Prophetic traditions, a fully valid source of Islamic law). But no, I did not call Mohammed a rapist and certainly not a pedophile.

Explanation: the Jordanian reacted not to my exact position, but to the "Islamophobes" in general, of whom he assumes I am one. (Islamophobia is a nonsense term launched ca. 2005 by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and designates all active or outspoken non-believers. The Turkish participant, apparently an OIC veteran, used this term against me.) Among Islam critics, it is indeed common to call Mohammed a "pedophile". Like many non-specialized Muslims, he also had only a hazy knowledge of Mohammed's actual words and acts. Since childhood, Muslims are fed a very idealized view of Mohammed, a hagiography. This explains why they develop such an attachment to their saintly Prophet, reason why in lectures before mixed audiences I postpone an irreverent treatment of the Prophet as long as possible. In this case, he only came up in question time. But to be sure, I stand by each of my statements and can justify with full reference to Islam's most authoritative texts every claim I made, both about the Prophet and about the Caliphate. Anything I said can safely be quoted against me, I will not wimp out with special pleading to distance myself from my own statements.

Abstraction made of high principles like freedom of expression, let us now focus on the meaning of the India Ideas Conclave for its organizers. A friend who was there sent me this comment:

"I don't effin' understand why they gave you that topic on the panel in that forum. They know what you think of Islam and they kind of set you up. Why in the hell, I wondered then and I wonder now, why they put you on a panel to speak about Islam at a Hindu Conclave??? You have not written about Islam for years. You are sort of like the Calcutta Quran Petition personified. You're rather a reverse authority on Islam. Everybody knew that. What about a panel on Hindutva? That's what you've been harping about for quite a while. Sorry to use such harsh phrasing, but sometimes I shudder when I read your critiques of Hinduism and Hindutva. I think, is that me???!! You could have had a far more effective use or placement for the purpose of this conclave. What was the point of rehashing your decades old cliques in that particular forum and no less on the same stage as a Bishop and a Muslim?"

To start with the last point: why this choice of the other panelists? The Norwegian bishop seemed alright, a harmless do-gooder until he was confronted with a question from the audience: "Do Hindus go to heaven?" He refused to say yes. It surprised me that as a seasoned interreligiousdialoguer, he would antagonize his audience so pointedly. Nowadays plenty of soft-brained Christians could be found willing to concede that non-Christians also go to heaven. Silly Hindus would then deduce that Christianity has changed and now allows non-Christians their non-Christian religion, even after death. In fact, these soft-Christians don't represent their Church and official Christian teachings, which haven't changed: outside Jesus no Salvation. But still, if your purpose was to have some interreligious chumminess (as, post factum, you apparently wanted from me), you could easily have found some Christians willing to say that even Hindus go to heaven. If necessary, knowledgeable people including myself could have informed you about how to deal with the Christian world. But then, you did not see the need to take advice since, as SR Goel observed, "Hindus always think they know everything about everything".

The other panelist was Sultan Shahin, a well-known activist for a moderate Islam. I am glad I had a chance to discuss Islam with him, and far was it from him to make a scene about our differences of opinion. His views are certainly worth discussing, and Hindus could well provide a forum for that. But even in his case, I wonder why he had to speak at an "India Ideas Conclave". The problem is that Hindus don't know themselves or their religion enough (let alone the other religions they engage) to confront third parties meaningfully. I am privy to interreligious dialogue episodes where Hindus gave a really embarrassing performance, not agreeing among themselves even about the fundamentals ("Hinduism is polytheist" -- "At heart, Hinduism is monotheïst"). It would be very useful to have a brainstorming conference where these fundamentals are discussed in a frank and truly progress-oriented manner, an "ideas conclave". But this very expensive conference was not it.

Then, you placed me in a panel on Islam. If you have followed my work, you should know that save for some opinion pieces, I haven't researched this topic for years (instead focusing e.g. on the Hindu-Buddhist relation, on the history of yoga, the Aryan debate etc., enough to choose from for an "Ideas" paper). The reason is that it simply holds no intellectual challenge for me anymore: Islam is a simple and straightforward topic, not worth a lifetime of research, and it is now capably handled by others, including ex-Muslims. Their websites give all the relevant information to Muslims and indeed to you. It was also a bit bizarre that I wasn't asked for a topic or title. Anyway, I had "ideas" on Islam which I did not expect anyone else to present, so I nonetheless accepted.

But as the conclave started, I saw that it was not at all a brainstorm session but a diplomatic exercise. Still, it was well-organized and interesting. I quickly wrote an alternative paper (at least, I jotted down some bullet points for it), less controversial but, I dare say, very appropriate and timely: the Hindu agenda and its implementation, yes or no, by the Narendra Modi government. I proposed it to moderator Sadanand Dhume, but he insisted that I talk about Islam. Well, he got what he asked for. Moral of the incident: be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

(The following paper was summarized during the India
Foundation’s India Ideas Conclave in
Goa, 19-21 Dec. 2014. When it started, I felt that the topic was too heady for
the audience, or at least for the intent of the organizers, so I quickly wrote
a second speech comparing the Narendra Modi Government’s performance with the
Hindu agenda, a logical topic for this conclave yet conspicuously missing. But
the chairman of my session insisted that I speak about Islam,
as this would match the other papers well. With this, he can hardly
complain.)

This is
meant to be an Ideas Conclave. It follows that I should not try to please you
with diplomatic niceties or electoral platitudes. Instead, we speakers have all
been invited to brainstorm about hard data and the mechanisms behind them, to
think issues through and fearlessly go wherever logic takes us, and stir your
intelligence with sharp and novel insights. This remains true even for such a
touchy subject as religious intolerance.

Allow me to
start with an anecdote. As you know, Mahatma Gandhi, whatever his faults, was a
staunch Hindu. Yet, when I stayed at the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation in
Delhi, I sat in on a conversation in which these Gandhians were debating
whether Hinduism should continue to exist at all. Some thought it could perhaps
still correct itself, others wanted to cut out the cancer of Hinduism
altogether. And indeed, it is considered normal to question Hinduism’s very
right to exist. Hindus are perfectly used to seeing their religion belittled,
accused and insulted day and night.

Therefore,
it is nothing new if I apply a similar treatment to Islam. Indeed, in this
paper I will argue that the answer to the question why the latest wave of
“Islamist” atrocities has happened, is very simple: Islam. I will show that
Islam itself is guilty. I have been given to understand that the two other
speakers will advocate a different opinion on the same topic, so if you don’t
like my point of view, you still have theirs to comfort you.

The Islamic State

Today, we
get a rare show of religious intolerance in the form of the Islamic State. Even
more than the Taliban, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the new-fangled Caliphate
represents our worst nightmare of Islam. Ever since TV brought its images of
sensational events and acts of war into our very homes, we have not yet been
treated to such explicit intolerance of a type we thought relegated to the
past. While murder remains a fact of life, the formal beheading of (Yezidi and
Assyrian) Infidels and of (Shiite) Heretics has become exceptional, a
throw-back to the witches’ trials and religious wars of centuries ago. While
exploitation remains a world problem, the actual taking of slaves to auction
them off at the slave-market is eerily premodern.

To be sure,
for Indians it is not such an otherworldly fantasy. Their republic was born in
1947 in massacres unleashed by the militants and supporters of the Pakistan
movement, finally killing a million or so and putting many millions to flight,
most of them Hindus (including Sikhs). Many of you will remember the East
Bengal genocide of 1971, where officially 3 million, according to scholars at
least a million, were killed, most of them Hindus. In sheer magnitude, this
death toll completely dwarfs anything that the Taliban or the Islamic State
have done so far.

The grim
advantage that the Islamic State now enjoys, however, is the omnipresence of
internet reporting, which they themselves promote with their youtube videos of
beheadings and other atrocities. Uniquely in-your-face. Another sensational
novelty is the official re-institution of slavery. Numerous victims of earlier
rounds of violence have effectively been exploited as slaves, particularly as
sex slaves (remember Pakistani General Tikka Khan in the Bangladesh war of 1971
justifying his soldiers’ rape campaign openly: “If we cannot hold East Bengal,
we will make sure that the next generation of Bengalis consists of bastards”); but
a formal institution of slavery, complete with slave markets and the official
fixing of auction prices, that is truly a return to the premodern age. This we
hadn’t seen in our lifetimes.

Countries
around the world take an extraordinary interest in the onward march of the
Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The reason is that some of their own
youngsters go there as military volunteers, or in the case of girls, as
volunteers to render sexual services to those warriors. Some come in the news
because they have been recognized on internet videos as executioners or
bystanders during beheadings; others because their death in battle is reported;
yet others because they are disappointed and have managed to get back home. The
authorities are very concerned with what these returning warriors might do in
their homelands, or what the sympathizers who never left but who support the
Islamic State might do.

What motivates the Islamic militants?

It is but
normal that we feel an urge to do something about these atrocities committed in
the name of Islam. Often our actions do not match our emotional revulsion,
though. The initial talk of “bringing our girls back” in the case of the hundreds
of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in early 2014 has petered out,
and at this time they have not been brought back. At any rate, any thought of
either remedying a condition that has just arisen, or preventing that it can
happen again in the long run, raises the question: why do the mujahedin do all this?

For the mujahedin themselves, it is very simple:
they do this in conformity with the commandments of Islam. If we take 11
September 2001 as a cut-off date, we have had since then hundreds of
testimonial videos in which suicide-bombers and other terrorists set out the
Islamic reasons for what they are about to do. When Mohammed Bouyeri killed
Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, he not only added a death threat to apostate
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a paper pinned in Theo’s corpse, but also explicitated that
Islam made him do it. Statements by terror movements such as Boko Haram, Hamas,
the Taliban and Islamic State are very explicit about their Islamic motivation.
The first thing Boko Haram did when it abducted the schoolgirls, was to
forcibly convert them to Islam.

By
contrast, our politicians, both Indian and Western, assure us that these
atrocities have extraneous causes and are foreign to Islam. Thus, it is said
that these are unemployed youngsters, often high-school drop-outs, losers in
our society who see risking their lives in military operations as a shortcut to
becoming important or at least someone respected. Yes, that is the route to
success or at least to a meaningful life which marginalized young men have
always chosen. But then why do non-Muslims not do the same thing? Why do they
settle for less than becoming beheaders? And why do we also find well-to-do
Muslims among the mujahedin, such as
the late lamented billionaire Osama bin Laden?

No matter
just how exactly the politicians and their media allies beat around the bush,
about one thing they are all in agreement: it has nothing to do with Islam. Out
of the dozens of big names I could quote here, let me settle for the eloquent
judgment of British PM David Cameron: the Caliphate warriors are “monsters, not
Muslims”. And since these warriors only want to emulate the Prophet, Cameron’s
words amount to saying: “The Prophet was a monster, not a Muslim”. Mind you, I
would never say such a thing (indeed, even in the secrecy of my thoughts I
don’t consider Mohammed a “monster”), but Cameron comes very close to asserting
just that.

Unfortunately,
Cameron and many of his ilk don’t respect Muslims. Personally, I take Muslims
seriously: if they say Islam made them do it, I take them at their word. But
Islam-lovers like Cameron or US Secretary of State John Kerry overrule the
Muslim perpetrators’ own testimony when it does not suit them. They have
invested heavily in a rosy picture of Islam, and they are willing to lie and
even to kill for it.

Yes, they
are ready to kill Muslims in order to uphold their delusion. Indeed, John Kerry
has said, justifying the armed attacks on the Caliphate, that one of the US war
aims was “remedying the distortion of Islam” which he imagined the Caliphate’s
orthodox Islam to be. This leads us to the paradox that Islamophiles are ready
to kill Muslims in order to defend Islam.

What must not be done?

Several
false trails are abroad, are even popular, nay, even espoused with firmness and
fanaticism, which are given as solutions for religious intolerance.

The violent
approach is at any rate the wrong one. Islamophile Western politicians have,
between them, killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Somalia, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Mali and Syria, all while making statements calling Islam “great”
and a “religion of peace”. Their only justification towards the Muslim world is
that they are merely killing “monsters, not Muslims”, a lie which no sane
Muslim will swallow. What the Muslim world needs, is a thaw. The present
polarization, aggravated by every new Western intervention, freezes men in
their beliefs and prejudices. In order to grow, they need some peace and
stability. By contrast, the Western interventions in Iraq and Libya have only
destabilized these countries, engendered a plethora of warring militias, and
enthroned sectarian rivalries culminating in the Islamic State.

Along the
same lines, many Hindus who want to get out of the Gandhian stereotype of the
“meek Hindu” fall into the other extreme, throw their weight around and try to
act tough: “Muslims should be taught a lesson!” While I recognize that in
emergencies, physical methods may be necessary (the Army’s defence of Kashmir,
the police’s re-empowerment in the no-go areas that have come up in places like Mewat or
Moradabad, the organized Hindu self-defence against the rise of Muslim
aggression in West Bengal), they will not go very far and will soon land into
abuses if they are not informed by a more fundamental doctrinal strategy. So,
my focus is to inform an elite capable of understanding Islam as an ideological
problem, essentially as a mistake, and then let these insights percolate to
the masses.

We have no
reason to go down the violent path. We make a clear distinction between Islam
as an ideology and Muslims as human beings. They are its captives, its
abductees, but of course they are people like the rest of us. (This distinction
is always and insistently blurred by the Islamophiles who, no matter how
thoroughly you refute their allegations, go on claiming that Islam criticism
amounts to “spreading hatred against 2 billion Muslims”.) Among your friends there are nice Muslims?
Well of course there are, the indoctrination in Islam sits lightly on numerous
nominal Muslims, who remain human beings after all, and only after that,
succumb in various degrees to the doctrine in which they have been raised. Their
goodness is part of their general human heritage and says nothing about Islam.

In
physicist Steven Weinberg’s words, “good people will do good and evil people
will do evil; but for good men to do evil – that takes religion”. Or in other
words, religion is like alcohol: some drunken drivers reach home safely anyway,
some teetotallers still manage to be a danger on the road, but for most people,
alcohol will affect their driving negatively. In the case of Islam, more followers
than in other doctrines are swayed by it into acts of fanaticism against
others.

Sameness

An
intellectual approach which appeals to post-religious atheists and secularists
is the line that “all religions are the same”, that they all equally lead to
fanaticism and terrorism. This is obviously untrue, and I am confident that I
won’t be contradicted by the numerous victims of Jain terrorism. Nothing in
other religions compares with the wave of Islamic violence that currently
affects dozens of countries.

Note also
the potential for religions to develop, e.g. Christianity gradually renounced
its practice of violent persecution and of slavery, which it voluntarily
abolished after having imbibed the spirit of the Enlightenment. Or consider
Hinduism, which in its early history developed the institution of caste, and
more recently has started eliminating caste. But such evolutions are more
difficult in the case of a religion closely bound up with a law system deemed
to be valid until Judgment Day, as Islam defines its Shari’a. Thus, the Islamic world has never abolished slavery but
was forced to do so by an outside world that had outgrown it. (The antics of
the Islamic State show how this abolition has been but skin-deep.)

The converse
approach is the idea that all religions are good, and true, and noble. And yes,
even Islam, a very late composite of elements from existing religions plus a
few personal innovations by the Prophet, has to contain worthwhile points. But
the fact that no religion equals zero, doesn’t imply that they all evenly equal
one. There may be equality before the law between human beings, but there is no
conceptual equality between doctrines, nor spiritual equality between paths.
Just as in science one theory may be plainly wrong while another one fits all
the available facts, one religion may be a false trail while another, though
still imperfect, may essentially be right.

In
particular, the second of the two points of the Islamic creed, that Mohammed
was the messenger of God, is demonstrably untrue. Most religions don’t think of
themselves as true or not: truth is for philosophy and scholarship, religion is
about devotion and surrender. Yet Islam insists on being the true religion,
while others are false. Alright then, let us judge Islam in terms of truth and
falsehood. There is nothing in Mohammed’s collection of messages, the Qur’ân,
that couldn’t have been said by a 7th-century Arab businessman,
including clumsy superstitions typical of the childhood of mankind. Some parts
may be OK as literature, but there is nothing divine about it. If we keep this
in mind, we have made a great stride out of the confusion arising as soon as
the word Islam is uttered.

What is to be done?

In the case
of the Islamic State’s attraction of youngsters, even from India, authorities
the world over wonder how to deal with it. We should not combat the consequences, viz. the
youngsters’ involvement in jihad, but the cause of this involvement, their prime
motivator, Islam itself. In every generation, some youngsters will not settle
for a syrupy version of their chosen ideology but insist on the radical
version. That radicalism is a normal phenomenon and need not be punished,
unless they have committed war crimes, and in that case, they can be punished
under existing laws.

The current
crisis situation only highlights the more general problem how to undo the impact
of Islam on its followers. But followers of Islam as such must not be punished
either, nor persecuted or discriminated against. This is useless and counterproductive,
as the survival of repressed religions under Communist regimes should teach us,
and it just goes against what we stand for. Freedom of religion should of
course also count for Muslims, let there be no doubt or lack of clarity about
that.

But I do
propose that Islam should be phased out, as should any delusionary belief. The
violent aspects of Islam make this need more pressing, but ultimately it is of
wider application. Indeed, I will draw upon my own experience as an apostate
from Catholic Christianity. I am but a representative of a whole generation
that turned Western Europe from predominantly Christian to predominantly
secular. Changes of religion do happen, even on a collective and continent-wide
scale. There is no reason why they could not happen in the Muslim world.

About the
homecoming of Muslims from their exile, their thraldom to Islam, my thoughts
are admittedly incomplete, and I am only making a beginning here. If all the
secularists in India had not wasted the past decades with defending religions
(except for Hinduism), but instead started deconstructing their favourite
religions, we would have been a lot closer to a solution. But the guilt and at
the same time the ridiculousness of the Indian secularist scene are topics for
another occasion. Fact is, some work remains to be done, and I welcome input from
others. Here, however, are a few stray ideas that may be helpful.

Ideas on apostasy
from Islam

·The first thing to do is that we ourselves are
clear about the nature of the Islam problem. Before we can even think of
telling the Muslims how we view Islam, we ought to understand it for and
amongst ourselves. Just a few days ago, I saw a TV debate in which a BJP
spokesmen called the Caliphate warriors “heretics”, implying that they do not
represent the true Islam. Sometimes this can be excused as an electoral gimmick
or a diplomatic platitude, to be expected among politicians. But I know from
experience that most Hindus are serious about such pseudo-expert notions. As a
wise Hindu told me, “the typical Hindu always thinks he knows everything about
everything”, and so he will pretend to tell Muslims what “real Islam” is. In
this case, he will tell the accomplished Islamic theologians behind the jihad
movements that they have it all wrong and that these are “heretics”. On the
contrary, all that the Islamic State makes headlines with, has been done by the
Prophet himself, who started wars of conquest, took hostages, ordered rape, took
and sold slaves, had his critics murdered or formally executed, and
discriminated between Muslims, other monotheists and real Pagans. Everything
the Caliphate does, can be justified if brought before an Islamic Court, unless
the judges are willing to state that Mohammed’s behaviour was un-Islamic and
illegitimate. You cannot find a single Islamic Court, Mosque or Madrassa where
it is held that “Mohammed was wrong”. The typical Hindu attitude to Islam is “under-informed
but over-opinionated” wishful thinking. So we will have to convince them and
other non-Muslims about the true nature of the Islam problem first.

·Telling Muslims what we think of Islam is
intellectually quite alright, but humanly we have to keep in mind that it is
delicate to offend people’s cherished convictions. It should only be done, as
it were, in self-defence. There is no need to “attack” Muslims with your
opinions, it is only when they themselves give you as valid their own (or at
least, Islam’s) opinions, that you may counter them. Only when they take the
initiative to call your religion false, should you respond by questioning their
own. This is but a matter of politeness and sensitivity, but also a premise of
the eternal dharma: speak gently, and only confront others with a harsh truth
when they ask for it.

·When we approach the Muslim community, let us keep
in mind how Christianity imploded in Europe. Since the 18th century,
an elite of freethinkers left the Church but had little influence among the
masses. After the Industrial Revolution, a large part of the working class also
left the Church. But the real breakthrough took place around 1970, a generation
after World War 2, when education was democratized and nobody who had gone to
school could take the defining dogmas of Christianity (hereditary sin as the
cause of mortality, Jesus as sole incarnation of God, virgin birth of Jesus,
salvation from sin and mortality through Jesus’ death and resurrection)
seriously anymore. It was no longer cool to be Christian, the defining beliefs
were ridiculed. As soon as enough people had left the Church, the force of
conformism, of doing like the others, which had so far retained people inside
the Church, now started working inversely. Those with little conviction, who
had only gone because of the neighbours, now stayed away because of the
neighbours. So now only a marginal percentage goes to church. This is what will
have to be achieved regarding Islam.

·The magnitude of the task should not be
underestimated. Thus, the comparison with European Christianity’s implosion is
valid but with the nuance that in Europe, the change in worldview was
facilitated by the high degree of individualism, which was both intrinsic to
the culture and reaching a new high in the post-WW2 welfare states. In Islamic
society, family and community ties tend to be stronger, and they in turn tend
to stabilize religious identity. Another reassuring argument among non-Muslims
is that the oil wealth is finite, so that the financing of Islam worldwide by
the Arab monarchies is bound to come to an end. Arabs oil sheikhs know this
too, and they prepare to switch to providing solar power to cold and cloudy Europe
from the Arab desert. Other scenarios may develop, and we cannot count on an
implosion of Islamic finances to solve the problem for us. People like to
believe anything that implies we do not have to actually do anything, but often
wrongly.

·In the case of Christianity, it is the young who
have convinced the old. Numerous are the families I know, where the first one
to stay away was a rebellious son. Then other youngsters rebelled, and finally
their parents followed suit. Aged people who once were devout Christians, and
who –- you would think -– would take consolation from their faith in their
declining years, openly confide: “Oh, how they fooled us in our youth!”
Similarly, we have to focus on the young Muslims, whose self-liberation from
Islam will then start taking along most of the older people. As for the older
ones who stick to their childhood beliefs: we will just tolerate that, as we
always have, because it is impossible and undesirable to pressurize them out of
their beliefs. Thoughts are free, opinions are perfectly permitted, so if people
insist on believing that the voice Mohammed heard carried a message from God,
well, let them. But such a belief should not be promoted. We should finally get
serious about India’s Constitutional provision that requires the promotion of
the scientific temper. If we expose the Muslim youth to the scientific way of
thinking, they will become sceptical of the defining dogmas of Islam.

·While in Europe, many people have left religion
altogether, it will be said that Indians are a religious nation, and that the
only alternative to Islam is another religion. Indeed, even in Europe, many
ex-Christians dabble in various alternative religions, including elements of
Hindu-Buddhism. Well, in the case of India, you already have every possible
alternative in place. For Indian Muslims, the alternative religion is all
around them. For most people, the Ghar-wâpasî
(“homecoming”), the return to their ancestral religion, will do. Moreover, it
allows for the introduction of positive ideas and attitudes: far more than a
critique of negatives, these will convince Muslims that there is a better world
outside Islam.

·Now, more concretely, expose youngsters in their
education and via the general culture to the demythologizing information about
Islam. This can be done not so much by the media which Westerners use, such as Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum or Robert Spencer’s Jihadwatch, but the forums of ex-Muslims
like faithfreedom.org by Ali Sina (pseudonym
of a Canadian Iranian) or islam-watch.org
by Ibn Warraq (pseudonym of a British Pakistani), or work by Anwar Sheikh,
Taslima Nasrin, Afshin Ellian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other ex-Muslims. Respond
positively to the demand of Muslim youngsters to pay more attention in schools
to Muslim thinkers, but then tell them the whole story rather than the streamlined
hagiography, e.g. the racist judgment by Ibn Khaldun on Blacks, or the account
by the Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta of slavery in the Delhi Sultanate, or
the motto of the Algerian Berber singer Lounès Matoub (murdered in 1998 by jihadis):
Ni Arabe ni Musulman , “neither Arab
nor Muslim”. There is nothing intrinsically Islamic in our Muslims, nothing
they cannot outgrow.

·Muslims will ultimately have to do it themselves,
they will outgrow their Islam in a natural process. But this process should not
be hampered by any artificial hurdles we put in its way. Let us at least not
give Islam the extra advantages that it now enjoys to prolong its existence.

(More controversial statements came about only during question time. My response there, and to some objections uttered afterwards, will be presented in a forthcoming contribution.)

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Is yoga
Indian? Till a few years ago, the question would have sounded absurd. Only in
some flaky New Age circles, there was talk of “Egyptian yoga” or “yoga among
the Atlanteans”, but this was sensibly dismissed as fanciful. Now, however, some
American scholars argue that yoga is a recent development owing more to British
army drills than to native tradition. Or at least, that is how the New York
Times has overstated their case. Enough for alerting US Hindus to “take back
yoga”.What is the true story behind
this commotion?

Modern
postural yoga, developed a century ago by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya at the
Maharaja of Mysore’s court, does owe a few elements to Western culture. These
include iconic exercises like the Headstand and the Salute to the Sun, a series
of older postures now linked into a dynamic sequence. While there is no explicit
record of Krishnamacharya borrowing either the general idea or the final
product, earlier texts or depictions seem not to refer to them. Add to this the
reorientation to a female public (“yoga for pregnancy”); traditionally, yoga
was meant for men, mostly monks, not for expectant mothers.

Then again,
Krishnamacharya only added some external details to an existing tradition.
Hatha Yoga, featuring contorted postures and breathing exercises, is
well-attested since ca. 1100 among a sect called the Nath Yogis. The American
term “Power Yoga”, popular among showbiz celebrities, is only a rough
translation of “Hatha Yoga”. Even the seemingly trendy promise of a lustrous
body, attractive to the opposite sex, appears in some yoga classics.

Under another
name, the physical discipline may go back even earlier. The Naga Sadhus,
already attested in the Rg-Veda, are martial monks who train in
wrestling-halls. India’s martial arts, like China’s and Japan’s, contain both
dynamic sequences and long-held postures, often requiring extremes of force,
suppleness or will-power. From those practices to modern postural yoga is not
such a big leap.

Most
importantly, yoga was originally conceived as meditation, aided by a straight
yet relaxed body. On Harappan seals, we find quite a few depictions of someone
sitting in meditation posture, but never in contortions or standing on his
head. So the tree trunk of meditation is already at least 4.500 years old in
India, while some additional branches grew later. Of these, a small percentage
may indeed have a foreign origin, but this makes little difference to yoga’s
over-all rootedness in the Indian soil.

What is
definitely Western, however, is the idea of a “Yoga Day”. Narendra Modi has
managed to convince the United Nations to accept 21 June (Summer Solstice, no
less) as a special day for yoga. Every disease, every long-dead artist and
every attention-hungry cause now has its own day, or month, or year. But yoga
is not a disease yearning for public money or for ego-stroking. India has shown
for thousands of years that yoga can thrive without such a Day.

Both Sita Ram Goel
and Vamadeva Shastri (David Frawley) have written a book called How I Became a Hindu. I could
never write such a book because I have deliberately made a choice not to
identify myself as Hindu. In this article I will explain “why I am not a
Hindu”.

Leaving Christianity

Before starting
out, let me put aside any possible confusion with another publication in
existence: the book Why I Am Not a Hindu
by Kancha Ilaiah, a convert to Christianity. I have seen post-Christian
Westerners grimly use it as a formidable argument against Hinduism, not
realizing that it is an ordinary missionary pamphlet against caste, to which
Hinduism is falsely reduced. Unlike Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, hefty tomes written by apostates who knew
their childhood religion very well, Why I
Am Not a Hindu is a caricature for simpletons. It starts out with a few
interesting sketches of caste life in his childhood village, but then descends
into unwarranted theoretical speculations for which he is simply not
equipped.Essentially he assumes, like
most haters of Hinduism, that “Hinduism is caste, wholly caste and nothing but
caste”, and that the only way to break free from caste is to destroy Hinduism
root and branch. The author is hopeful that Hinduism is indeed losing out, and
a recent book by him muses about a “post-Hindu India”. That is of course the
missionary vision.

It is not my
vision. I think Hindus are better off staying Hindu, and that South-Asian
Christians and Muslims had better shed their divisive faiths and return to the
Hindu civilization which their ancestors left. I know first-hand that there is
life after apostasy from Christianity or Islam, being an apostate from
Christianity. I belong to the generation that collectively walked out of the
Church. In my society, the Flemish part of Belgium, the vast majority in my
childhood used to be practising Catholics, now these are only a small minority.
There is no danger that many will return to the faith, even on their deathbeds:
the knowledge pin-pricking the basic Catholic truth claims is just too strong.

Recognizing one’s friends

However, when
tempted to think that that is obvious, internet Hindus are there to accuse me
of being a clog in a world conspiracy, mostly as a missionary agent. These
people really live in a fantasy world, for a real-world organization that means
business, such as the Church (practically any Church), would at least pay its
agents. Well, I am not being paid by the Church nor by any other lobby-group.
Worse about their lack of worldly wisdom is that they haven’t heard about the
very real decline of the Church. Anachronistically, they are still fulminating
against TB Macaulay and Max Müller and feel very brave when kicking against
corpses; more recent developments have passed them by. Yet, I keep on meeting
Hindus who assume I am a believer, even after having read me, or who suspect I
merely claim to be past all that in order to gain the confidence of the Hindus,
but am secretly an agent for the Church.

Not being able to
recognize your own friends is a very serious drawback in life. It is my
experience that Hindus are very defective in this regard. One of the five books
of the Pañcatantra is meant to teach
“the art of making friends”, originally to three not-so-gifted princes.
Presumably the fables succeed in making even these dummies understand how to
make friends. Among Hindu activists, by contrast, I notice a greater
proficiency in the art of making enemies. This takes two forms: treating
friends as enemies, and turning friends into enemies.

In the diaspora
Hindu movement in the US and the UK, I have been privy, just in the last three
years, to good initiatives getting marred by infighting, defections and
hostilities against ex-friends. In this case, it seems to me that giving names
and details will only make matters worse, so I won’t. But one example I can
easily divulge is the attacks on myself.Ever since I took upon me the unpleasant job of giving Hindus feedback
about their glaring and costly mistakes in history rectification initiatives, I
have received quite an amount of hate mail. And mind you, I am not using the
term “hate mail” (or “death threats”, a term used by Romila Thapar, who was
safe and sound but couldn’t stand being criticized) lightly. It does not mean a
mail from someone who disagrees. If only internet Hindus were to argue
dissenting points of view, that would be fine; but more often than arguments
they just give you abuse.

One serious
example of making outsiders into enemies concerns those Hindus who borrow
conspiracies about the Jews. Some Western forums and websites specialize in
stories about “the Israeli secret service Mossad having engineered the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001” or about “the Jewish bankers behind the
world financial crisis of 2008” (and of 1929 etc.). Individual internet Hindus
sometimes interiorize this line of rhetoric, and they are too blind or too
self-important to see that they are beautifully playing into the hands of their
enemies. After centuries of Hindus giving a uniquely good treatment to their
Jewish minority, after V.D. Savarkar and the BJP supporting Zionism, after
cases of collaboration between American Hindus and the “Jewish lobby”, and
after the mounting military cooperation between Israel and India, the powerful
Indo-American secularist lobby, well-entrenched in the universities, would love
to break this Hindu-Jewish alliance. Enter the Hindu lobby, that gives them all
they want to hear, and especially to quote. Those lobbyists (once more
confirming SR Goel’s impression that they are “the biggest collection of
duffers that ever came together in world history”) are easily capable of
driving a wedge between the Hindu activists and any friends they threaten to
make. But the internet Hindus concerned are too smug and too wrapped up in
their fantasies to see the strategic implications of their fanciful arrogance
for the broader Hindu cause.

In India, the
Hindu activists are closer to power, with a handful of BJP governments in some
states or other, and now (December 2014) even a BJP government at the centre.
Power tends to quell infighting, firstly because there are constructive things
to do, with tangible tasks and results; secondly, because any individual
disgruntledness or unease can always be bought off with a post or perk. But
that is the peace of the lowest common denominator. It is OK that Hindus don’t
roll on the floor fighting each other, but it is another question whether they are
focused enough to achieve anything in their times in power – other than keeping
the enemy out of power.

At any rate, I am
a friend. And that loyalty is not dependent on the attitudes of some Hindus
towards my person. I am convinced that, in spite of some human failings, the
best Hindu doctrines are true, and Hinduism is a far more desirable worldview
and way of life than its challengers.

Unwanted

I do know that numerous Hindus object to foreign converts and spew their
venom at “white Hindus”. They may even be the same people who otherwise like to
quote the praises of Hinduism by Arthur Schopenhauer, Mark Twain, Romain
Rolland and other Westerners. At one time I was not aware of this phenomenon.
And yet it is but the in-your-face dimension of a deeper-seated mistrust and
unease among Hindus of any transgressing of the boundaries between inside and
outside Hinduism.

Indeed, at one
time I was so enthusiastic about Hinduism that I had made up my mind to
formally convert. I mentioned my desire to become a Hindu to Prof. Kedar Nath
Mishra, the philosopher of Banaras Hindu University who had accepted me as a
Ph.D. candidate. However, I immediately noticed his lack of enthusiasm, much in
contrast to how a Muslim would react. Out loud, he only commented that this
matter should certainly not be hurried. This is in fact only common sense: even
responsible Christian missionaries eager to make conversions still insist on
verifying whether a candidate is serious. If he loses his initial fervour for
his new religion and quits it, this would mean that much ado had been about
nothing, and constitute a greater loss of face for his conversion sponsor than
his accession was a gain. So, the temporization is universal and reasonable. But
I sensed there was more to it than that.

One is member of a
caste by birth. There is no conversion possible from one’s own birth-group to
another. All the castes combined have been called Hindu society, so one is a
Hindu by birth. One is born within a community, and while people can change
jobs, swap wives or borrow new ideas, they cannot change the facts pertaining
to their birth. So, Prof. Mishra was born as a Hindu and has remained a Hindu
until his death; while I was born as a non-Hindu and will die as a non-Hindu.

Even Hindu
organizations explicitly preaching and practising conversions, such as the Arya
Samaj and the Vishva Hindu Parishad, only target former Hindus or people on the
margins of Hindu society. Their “recoversions” only concerns Indian Muslims or
Christians whose ancestors were Hindus, or tribals who only recently were
seduced by the missionaries. We see the same thing among other national religions.
In the Iranian community of Los Angeles, as well as in Ossetia and Tajikistan,
many Muslims reconvert to their ancestral Zoroastrianism (eventhough the
Ossetes’ Scythian ancestors may have largely escaped the specifically
Zoroastrian reform of the Iranian religion), but the Zoroastrians do not
welcome non-Iranians. In Yakutia, an ethnically Turkic republic within the
Russian Federation, the traditional Turkic religion (which is not Islam) has
become legally recognized in 2014. The Russian Orthodox Church (more
nation-oriented than the Catholic and Protestant Churches) did not object, on
the understanding that only native Yakuts would feel attracted to this
religion, while Russians would remain Orthodox. So, outside Christianity and
Islam, and even within some strands of Christianity, there exists an
identification of religious traditions with national communities, into which
one has irrevocably been born (or not).

Many Hindus
welcome converts, and take pride in the existence of Westerners who have embraced
Hinduism. However, I do not want to enter a house where other inhabitants
object to my presence. I don’t mind if they object to my ideas or my conduct,
but if they object to my very presence, I have to take their attitude into
account. And so, I am only too aware of those other Hindus who find it rather
bizarre that outsiders would want to become Hindu. Moreover, their negative
attitude does not amount to disrespect: most of them can respect me as a
Westerner, it is only the strange inclination to perforce self-identify as a
Hindu which they object to.

Traditionally,
Hinduism only knows collective conversion, or at least integration which
Chrstians might describe as conversion, i.e. a whole existing community that
retains its own ways and autonomy but accepts the over-all framework of Vedic
society; and very exceptionally, individual conversion through marriage. If an
existing Hindu community accepts you as a son-in-law, then everybody accepts
you as a member of that particular community. One never knows whom one may yet
meet in life, but so far, this hasn’t happened to me.

Link with India

This fact of a
rejection by others, by a sizable part of the legitimate Hindu population, is
already enough for me not to call myself a Hindu. It is a conception of converting
religions to consider the most true or somehow most desirable religion as the one
of which we should be a member. If you wax enthusiastic about a Hindu practice
like yoga, most Hindus will say: go ahead and practise it, become a European
yogi, or as the case may be, a Japanese yogi, a Rastafarian yogi, a Hottentot
yogi. At the end of your life, you may write an autobiography: Story of a European Yogi, but please don’t
affect being a Hindu.

A second reason is
that “Hindu”, as the Persian form of Sindhu
(the Indus river), refers to India. Originally it meant “one who lives at or
beyond the Indus”, a purely geographical term meaning “Indian”, later the
Muslim invaders turned it into a geographical-cum-religious term: “any Indian
Pagan”. According to VD Savarkar, a Hindu is one who considers India both his
Fatherland and Holyland. The West now has a sizable Hindu population, but they
are for the most part People of Indian Origin. When Hindus praise the work
benefiting Hinduism that I have done, they typically speculate that I “must
have been born in India in my past life”. So, there is always that connection
to India. Well, at present I may be a regular traveller to India, but my roots
lie in Europe.

To put it crudely,
I don’t care for India. It is true that Hinduism grew up on Indian soil, and I
strongly disagree with those colleagues who insist that “yoga isn’t from India”.
Of course India is historically the place where Hinduism grew up, and even now
India is worth defending against those who besiege it. But the ideas and
practices that make up the beauty of Hinduism could have come about elsewhere
too, and partly they have. Religions related to or typologically similar to
Hinduism have existed though they have largely been wiped off the map by
Christianity and Islam, and even these have preserved certain traditions that
Hindus would feel familiar with. So, India as the cradle of Hinduism is a fact
of life, but it is also relative and a shaky foundation for a religion that
sees itself as the eternal Dharma. “One day, India too will go”, to quote my
yoga teacher Dr. Pukh Raj Sharma from Jodhpur.

Compare with
Christianity. Numerous Hindus have the tendency to identify Christianity with
the West. In reality, Christian missionaries see it as the universal truth,
equally valid for Indians as for Westerners. The geographical claim is at any
rate historically untrue: in the Roman Empire, the Christians were called the
“Galileans” to mark their religion as an import into the West from the Middle
East. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the site of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection
has a certain place in Christian history, if only because it provider the casus belli of the Crusades, but it
testifies to the Europeans’ awareness that Christianity originated outside
Europe. European ex-Christians with nationalist convictions hold it against
Christianity that it is foreign. The Christian answer to that would not be to
deny its foreign origin, but to insist that it is the true religion and that
therefore everyone should accede to it. As for European culture and its
national divisions, these can get a place in Christianity: inculturation has a
long history, and to a large extent, national folklore has indeed merged with
Christianity. So, in India’s case, a feeling of Indianness is welcome to
flourish in Indian churches, using Indian materials during rituals or singing
Indian music, as long as everyone believes in the imported teachings of the
Church.

Secondly, this
identification with a nation just doesn’t apply. The motor car has been
invented in the West, but the cars on the Indian roads apply the exact same
mechanical principles which the German inventors once implemented to build the
first motor car. There is no such thing as “Indian car mechanics”, this science
is universal. The Law of Gravity was discovered by an Englishman, Isaac Newton,
but would have been just the same if it had been discovered by anyone else,
anywhere else. Likewise, anything true is universally true, so if the Christian
core teachings are true, they should also be accepted as true by Indians; if
not, they are not true for Westerners either. That is why it only shows
incomprehension to argue about whether Christianity is or is not Indian; the
only sensible question is whether it is true. Yajñavalkya never argued about
the Indianness (a concept that didn’t even exist yet) of the doctrine of the
Self. Nor did Shankara engage in debates about whether Dualism was more Indian
than non-Dualism; he only cared about which view was more true. So, let us
follow in the footsteps of these great Indian thinkers and forget about
Indianness.

However, Hinduism
pertains to more than just the truth of a doctrine. It effectively also has a
geographical component. For that reason, I may agree with the Hindu thinker Yajñavalkya,
be doctrinally on the same wavelength, yet not be a Hindu.

Hinduism as Paganism

Without creedal
religions like Christianity, the world simply consists of a landscape of
different sects or traditions. These are not foreign to one another, as
witnessed by the practice of interpretatio
Romana, i.e. Julius Caesar’s approach of the Celtic deities he encountered
in Gaul and whom he “translated” into the corresponding deities in the Roman
pantheon. The practice already existed in the ancient Middle East, and can
easily be seen in the names of the week days, where the names of the planets
were translated from Sumerian to Akkadian and Aramaic, these to Greek, thence
to Sanskrit and Latin, thence to Hindi, English etc. The planet Jupiter was
Marduk to the Babylonians, Jupiter to the Romans, Thor to the Brits, Guru to
the Indians, etc.

The ancient Arab
traders went on pilgrimage to the Somnath temple, because in the moon-bearing
Shiva they recognized their own moon-god Hubal. And conversely, Indian traders
doing business in Arabia went to the Kaaba in Mecca because its presiding deity
Hubal was clearly their own Shiva. Yes, in the human netherworld there were local
differences, but these were not consequential. The places from which you see
the starry sky are different, but the stars in heaven are the same.

So, I have decided
to focus on the absolute unity of heaven, more than on the relative difference
of the vantage-points on earth. Therefore, I don’t care anymore about being
from here or from there, the truth would in each case turn out to be the same.
It doesn’t change anything to my worldview or my way of life whether I
artificially try to change myself into a Hindu or naturally define myself as
being European and all other levels of identity that happen to apply to me.

A Hindu name

In Western yoga
circles, I know numerous people who have received a Sanskrit name, and many of
them also use it. A few have even gone to the town hall or the court to change
their civil names and officially register the Sanskrit names. Though I have
received quite a few initiations (Diksha)
from Hindu Gurus, somehow I have never been given a Sanskrit name. Fortunately
so, for that saves me the trouble of having to decide whether to actually use
this name or not. Probably not.

Not that it
matters to me if others do it. Most Westerners who have a Sanskrit name live
among Westerners and so there is no occasion for confusion. By vocation, I am
more in touch with Hindu society, and that makes it confusing if I would adopt
a Hindu-sounding name. (For the same reason, I disapprove of converts to
Christianity retaining their Hindu names, a new Church policy consciously
seeking to confuse and conceal.) Also, it is but normal that those who become Hindu
monks get a monastic name, just as a Catholic monk changes his civil name to a
given monastic name.

My own given name
is Germanic and profound enough. Koen
means “brave”, raad means “counsel” “deciding
what is to be done”. Its Greek equivalent was Thrasuboulos, which happens to be the name of a victorious general,
national liberator and pioneer of democracy in Athens, killed in battle while
fighting for his polity. So, I will just keep it.

That also happens
to be the Hindu thing to do. Thus, some equality-minded Hindus hide their
caste-specific last name, e.g. calling themselves (to name one example I have
known) Maheshvari Prasad instead of the recognizably Brahmin name
Maheshvariprasad Sharma. Yet, they will never intrude into another caste by giving
themselves a last name suggestive of another caste identity, say
Maheshvariprasad Yadav or Maheshvariprasad Varma.So likewise, I will not intrude into the
Hindu commonwealth by claiming a Hindu identity and calling myself by a Hindu
name.

Hindus don’t have
this notion of a creedal identity. A creed or worldview can be chosen (and
indeed I have the experience of trading in a religion imposed on me for another
persuasion); while an identity is simply there. So, I just accept that I carry
the non-Hindu name Koenraad without having
chosen it, and I will not choose another one.(Hindu Human Rights, 14 Dec. 2014)

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.